Chronic diseases such as heart failure, diabetes, cancer, and stroke are the leading causes of death and disability in the United States. More than 70% of deaths among Americans are caused by chronic diseases and more than 133 million Americans, or about 1 out of 2 adults, have at least one chronic disease. Costs of chronic illness are also hard to neglect. In the United States, heart failure cost $39.2 billion in 2010, and diabetes cost $174 billion in 2007. Early diagnosis and treatment can improve quality of life and life expectancy for people with chronic diseases. Treatment usually involves lifestyle changes such as collecting biomedical readings, taking medicines, regulating diets, and doing regular physical activity.
Remote health monitoring has led to an improved quality of life, a higher efficiency, and an increased accessibility for healthcare professionals to patients with chronic diseases. For patients with chronic diseases, remote health monitoring systems provide remote sensing and data processing to make health status monitoring, data analysis, guidance, and emergency prevention available at home, without requiring the presence a full-time professional caregiver. These systems collect biomedical data that may be delivered to a central server for storage and analysis. This analysis is used centrally by caregivers to remotely monitor and assess their patients' health. If an abnormality in the patient's health is detected by the remote health monitoring system or noticed by a caregiver based on the information collected by the remote health monitoring system, the patient can be prompted to change a dose of a medication, to alter a level of physical activity, or to take other steps for addressing the abnormality. Such patient guidance can lead to significant improvements in patient health.
In the remote health monitoring domain, patients are required to perform daily tasks provided by their health care professionals. For many reasons, it may be desired to gather a large amount of data from a patient, and to provide many daily tasks to be performed. However, task complexity and difficulty can affect user participation and satisfaction. If a patient is presented too many tasks, it is more likely that the patient will skip some of the tasks or stop using the remote monitoring system altogether. Such system non-use can severely degrade the effectiveness of the designed system, and missing data can lead to biased and dangerous conclusions.
What is needed are techniques for reducing the number or complexity of tasks a patient must perform while nevertheless obtaining adequate monitored information from the patient to generate meaningful predictions about patient health.